Fox Evil

by Minette Walters

Published 8 November 2002

When elderly Ailsa Lockyer-Fox is found dead in her garden, dressed only in nightclothes and with blood stains on the ground near her body, the finger of suspicion points at her wealthy, landowning husband, Colonel James Lockyer-Fox. A coroner's inquest gives a verdict of 'natural causes' but the gossip surrounding him refuses to go away. Why? Because he's guilty? Or because resentful women in the isolated Dorset village where he lives rule the roost?

Shenstead is a place of too few people and too many secrets. Friendless and alone, his reclusive behaviour begins to alarm his London-based solicitor, Mark Ankerton, whose alarm deepens when he discovers that James has become the victim of a relentless campaign which accuses him of far worse than the death of his wife. Allegations which he refuses to challenge . . . So begins a bitter war of resentment, and an unlikely alliance between strangers, whose clearer eyes and compassionate natures reveal evil for what it really is . . .


The Shape of Snakes

by Minette Walters

Published 20 October 2000
Minette Walters' new bestselling crime novel explores one woman's obsession with a death she witnessed and which she alone believes was murder...November 1978, Britain is on strike. The dead lie unburied, rubbish piles in the streets - and somewhere is West London a black woman dies in a rain-soaked gutter. Her passing would have gone unmourned but for the young woman who finds her and who believes - apparently against reason - that Annie was murdered, for the police record the death as a simple RTA. But whatever the truth about Annie - whether she was as mad as her neighbours claimed, whether she lived in squalor as the police said, whether she cruelly mistreated the cats found starving in her house - something passed between her and Mrs Ranelagh in the moment of death which binds this one woman to her cause for the next twenty years. But why is Mrs Ranelagh so convinced it was murder when by her own account Annie died without speaking? Why does the subject make her husband so angry that he refuses to talk about what happened that night? And why would any woman spend twenty painstaking years uncovering the truth - unless her reasons are personal...?

Acid Row

by Minette Walters

Published 1 November 2001

Acid Row. The name the beleaguered inhabitants give to their 'sink' estate. A no-man's land of single mothers and fatherless children - where angry, alienated youth controls the streets.

Into this battleground comes Sophie Morrison, a young doctor visiting a patient in Acid Row. Little does she know she that is entering the home of a known paedophile . . . and with reports circulating that a tormented child called Amy has disappeared, the vigilantes are out in force . . .

Soon Sophie is trapped at the centre of a terrifying siege, with a man she has come to despise. Whipped to a frenzy by unsubstaniated rumour, the mob unleashes its hatred. Against authority . . . the law . . . and the 'pervert'. 'Protecting Amy' becomes the catch-all defence for the terrible events that follow. And if murder is part of it, then so be it. BUT IS AMY REALLY MISSING?